Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture:
"Playtime." The gay black filmmaker-photographer
Isaac Julien, a major figure in British visual art and queer indie cinema who
grew up in London's East End, was last in San Francisco for his lushly romantic
photography show "Looking for Langston." He's back, this time with
three timely, large-scale video installations that address the interconnection
of labor, capitalism and information flow in the globalist age. Taking its
title from Jacques Tati's 1967 film "Playtime," the central 70-minute
montage with James Franco and Maggie Cheung plays out across seven large
monitors and three capital cities – London, Reykjavik and Dubai –
focusing on different characters impacted by the 2008 financial crisis (2014).
Also included in the exhibition is a companion piece, "Kapital"
(2013), chronicling an academic, London-based panel discussion; and a cinematic
cut of "Better Life (Ten Thousand Waves)" (2010), the artist's
ambitious rumination on a migrant labor tragedy and its wider societal
implications. Shot in Mainland China with contemporary and archival footage of
Shanghai, it's shown on a single screen at San Francisco Art Institute's newly
built Gray Box media gallery on the Ft. Mason campus. Through Feb. 11. fortmason.org.

Haines Gallery: "Lands
End: California at Larkin." I was first wowed by the work of San Francisco
photographer John Chiara several years ago at Pier 24. Stationed prominently on
the wall in the entry to that facility's soaring warehouse space, Chiara's "Embarcadero
at Interstate 80," a pair of exhilarating, monumental 50"x80"
pictures shot from underneath the Bay Bridge gazing upward, made me want to
stand up and shout. Chiara's Bay Area landscapes are a world apart from the
typical, prettified postcards of iconic San Francisco, in part because he works
with a mammoth, custom-built camera obscura, and prints directly onto
photographic paper, leaving behind remnants of the process: torn edges,
chemical streaking, etc. In his latest show, he deploys techniques that hark
back to the 19th century, training his attention on sweeping ocean vistas and
fog-shrouded beaches of the northwestern California coastline with predictably
thrilling results, and the steep hills and urban architecture of an
intersection where the Tenderloin meets Nob Hill. Through Dec. 23. hainesgallery.com.

Ever Gold Projects:
Marc Horowitz's "'You can't do that to them,' the wiser, older Architect
said" explores glitches that can alter one's perspective, but he's
especially interested in disorientation triggered by rifts in time. His
fanciful paintings start with an injection of visual nostalgia reminiscent of
19th and 20th century Currier & Ives prints, which promoted the American
dream and manifest destiny. But Norman Rockwell Americana this is not.
Horowitz, an SFAI alumna, is fond of visual puns, social media pranks he
transforms into attention-getting projects, and subverting familiar tropes of
pop culture. He overlays his imagery with bursts of color and unexpected
references, as in "Old Traps disappear and new ones emerge," where a
hearty pioneer, hurling a weapon in a snowy woodland camp, is eyed suspiciously
by a red blob in the shape of a teepee shot through with spears, the kind one
might see in kids' Saturday morning cartoon shows. Through Dec. 16. evergoldprojects.com.

Jack Fischer Gallery at Minnesota Street Project:
"Hoodwink by Didactix." Ever on the hunt
for fairness in an unjust, increasingly ludicrous world, Juan Carlos Quintana
has created a rogues' gallery of unappetizing characters, most of whom you
wouldn't want to be stuck in an elevator with, and lodged them in cartoonish
ink & acrylic paintings. The artist's stinging social commentaries hit
their zing-worthy targets – the new elites and the nouveau riche, "hubris,
incompetence, arrogance and folly" – with humor and without mercy
like an amped-up, hyper-dyspeptic Roz Chast. With titles such as "Maligned
Do Gooders," "Xenophobia," "Last Selfie Before the
Apocalypse" and "Revenge of the Philistines," one gets where
this self-taught Oakland artist is coming from at a time when, as he says, "the
powers-that-be fervently gaslight the populace." Through Dec. 30. jackfischergallery.com.

Robert Koch Gallery's
three-photographer show includes Debra Bloomfield, whose latest large-scale
series "Seas" captures the daily drama of the shifting horizon line,
gradations of sea, sky, fog and shadow, and the turbulence of a weather-generating
ocean, while obliquely addressing climate change and rising seas. Foregoing
traditional darkroom techniques and using the lumen print process, Rachelle
Bussieres's recent works, influenced by the hues and golden light of Western
skies, suggest ice formations, mountains, moons and other heavenly bodies,
while Rebecca Norris Webb, who has published a half-dozen photography books
with her husband and collaborator, Alex Webb, and on her own, creates complex
still-lifes with the restlessness of cinema. Through December 30;
kochgallery.com

Weinstein Gallery: In
"Obscure Line between Fact and Fiction," a mid-career retrospective
of work by Marcus Jansen, the German-American painter dubbed the progenitor of "modern
urban expressionism," one can detect vestiges of the rebellious, hit-and-run
aesthetic of the 1980s graffiti movement that influenced him. A U.S. army
veteran who served on the front lines during the Iraq war, he was profoundly
affected by the violence he witnessed, and channeled his PTSD and the wounded
desert landscape of wartime memory into an indictment of American imperialism
and a media-obsessed society. Alienation, isolation and absurdity go hand-in-hand
in a succession of emotional, surrealistic canvases: a lone zebra wanders the
Savannah wilderness; a solitary figure on the dark side of the moon is dwarfed
by a distant eclipse; men in empty suits are minus heads or faces; an anemic
pink rooster is subjected to arcane experiments; and a dancer leaps across a
chasm from one junk heap to another. Through Jan. 20. weinstein.com.